Sarah Evelyn On How She Costumed Some of the Most Beautiful Characters on TV for ‘The Beauty’

If you suddenly became the ideal version of yourself, would your wardrobe change? Sometimes we don’t know it, but we dress a certain way to help enhance our moods or give us permission to feel good. If you take dressing how you feel out of the equation, though, I wonder how drastically varied our closets would look. If you became a sample size, would you suddenly run out and become a different person on the outside? Costume designer Sarah Evelyn gives us gorgeous duds to drool over while we consider how a magic injection would change our perceptions of self, beauty, and even fashion.

With a show like The Beauty, even the title sets a standard. How do we create towards something when a main theme running through the veins of a new series is the pursuit and desire of absolute perfection. Evelyn knew that she could really lean on the breadth of knowledge and specificity from a leader like Ryan Murphy. He wants to create something like you’ve never seen it before, and Evelyn shares some of the things he wanted her to look at for inspiration

“With any Ryan Murphy show, you know you are talking about a certain visual lexicon where beauty is of importance, and he’s always questioning our current beauty standards,” Evelyn says. “There’s a Warholian aspect to Ryan where he can cast the most beautiful women on his shows, and he’s already been asking us to examine how we think about beauty all the way back to shows like Nip/Tuck. I think we all have a beauty focus in society, and we did have to find that answer in the aesthetic of the show. It’s about whimsy and fantasy pushing the actual beauty while also letting the question be there lying on top.

The references that he came in with in that first meeting really told me how hard he wanted to go with this. He spoke about Italian films from the ’60s and ’70s and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers and Last Tango in Paris, which were considered so controversial but I love them. When he referenced The Hunger, I was fascinated with what he was trying to tell me.”

The first episode of the season begins with a fashion show in Paris with severe looking models stomping in literal mud as a collection of maroon/dark red, leather pieces cling to the models’ bodies. When Bella Hadid’s model goes rogue and leaps off the runway, her outfit almost becomes armor as she knocks people out of her way before hopping onto a motorcycle to cause more chaos. Evelyn knew that making an entire collection was a big deal.

“Collections take months and months to design, and I would never proport to be a fashion designer,” she says, with a chuckle. “If you are going to do something that big, you are going to need to start with your own constraint, and we talked about what the colors should be and what the setting should be like. I started from a place of knowing that I wanted it to be leathery and badass–something that would translate to the motorcycle when the character went outside. I just had to start sketching, and when I got to seven looks that I liked, Ryan, Lou Eyrich and I discussed further which ones we liked. When I found out that I was going to dress Bella Hadid, I almost died of happiness.”

Ashton Kutcher’s Byron Forst is the face of The Beauty, and he really lets himself go in the role. He even wears costumes in an entirely different way. Is there a connection between pre-Beauty and post-Beauty, or do some characters want a complete separation with their new selves? Early in the season, we see him aboard a yacht where he receiving a blowjob and sporting a fabulous robe, and Evelyn reveals a Burning Man connection. She allows Byron to be a little more fey or less masculine with scarves, patterns, and key choices of color.

“Ashton was cast before Vincent D’Onofrio, and, at first, Ashton was in more color because Vincent was,” Evelyn says. “A lot of this process was finding breadcrumbs in terms of trying one thing and then realizing that something else might work better. When we first started with Ashton, he walked right into a suit–it was fucking amazing. He could definitely be a model, but he was really down to play. We started with the suiting since he has model proportions and he can make any suit look expensive, but then I wanted to push it further. I didn’t want to put him in too many bright colors because that didn’t seem realistic for Byron, but we could push with neck scarves or shirts that were open to help go sexy with the silhouettes. Very Euro and elevated. Byron felt like someone who would want to show off his body once he had taken the treatment.

For that robe, Ashton came into my room and told me that he and Ryan were talking about the yacht scene and that it was going to be in Europe. I thought we’d have to send the clothes the next day or something. Since Byron was at Burning Man, I feel like the robe would have to be something that he wore there since he just came from there. Later on, when we see the pre-Bryon, played by Vincent, taking The Beauty, I thought the robe would be super Burning Man. On our mood board, we had a coat made up from dolls stitched together, and Ryan loved that. And then we switched it to teddy bears.”

Anthony Ramos’ The Assassin wears exclusively wears black, and he feels like he is even channeling The Matrix with some leather jacket pieces. With his particular eyepatch and slick presence, the clothes felt like a second skin on Ramos.

“It is near impossible to find leather jackets that fit very well,” she says. “We ended up custom making everything, and, thankfully, we had a great lighting team so the texture can be seen. There are a lot of dark costumes in The Beauty. We had to make everything, because you can take leather in but you can’t take it out. You can’t make the stitch holes go away, so it because difficult to tailor.”

Isabella Rossellini’s Franny Forst wears exaggerated silhouettes and doesn’t look like anyone else, which is a great detail considering that she is the only character not clamoring to take The Beauty. In episode 8 she sports a shiny, pink, feathered robe, and the flowery fascinators get larger and more extravagant as the season continues. In the finale, we see one character in an homage to her Lisle von Rhuman backless, jeweled top. It’s a detail that goes beyond homage and affection that fits right in line with the show’s themes.

“We got a lot of silhouettes ready for her before she got there,” she says. “We didn’t have a lot of time for the fittings, so we decided to build some things ready but out of the fabric we wanted to use for her–let’s kind of build her a closet and then pull the rest. We could modify hats or jewelry later. I was blown away at how much she wanted to play dress up, and she has such a wealth of empirical knowledge. The first outfit we landed on was the outfit on the yacht, and we initially made the pannier go underneath before we played with it going over. Once we got to a couple of really big skirts, it led into pieces that were more not so much like the Tudor-style skirt but that huge peach caftan with the ginormous flower hat.

For that Death Becomes Her moment at the end, it was so fun to have a meta moment since Isabella and Nicola [Peltz] were there together on set. You don’t get that very often since shooting schedules never align like that typically.”

With such an ambitious, aspirational costumes for every single character, it was difficult for me to tell Evelyn which piece I would want to swipe from the set for myself. I settled, though, on Ben Platt’s blue and brown suit  from episode four, or I could see myself trying to put Ari Graynor’s wide shoulderpads (from episode eight) in my truck.

“I was so into the Tom Brown outfits that Tig and Gunther were wearing at the end,” Evelyn says. “I am a bit of a tomboy, so I’d say that or anything Jeremy wears. I like some commentary on gender in general, so I’d take some of the boys’ clothes.”

The Beauty is streaming now on Hulu and Disney+.